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Blog-Bleary? Try (What Else?) a Blog

BY pointing readers to the Web's newest and best bits, Web logs offer a way to cut through online clutter. But now that there are millions of blogs, what was once a solution to the information glut has started to become part of the problem. So perhaps inevitably, sites and services have popped up that add another level to the information food chain by digesting the Web digests.

The latest such site, Kinja, is scheduled to open to the public today at www.kinja.com. The site automatically compiles digests of blogs covering subject areas like politics and baseball. Short excerpts from the blogs are included, with links to the complete entries on the individual blog sites. After signing up for a free account with Kinja, users can enter the addresses of their favorite blogs and generate a digest -- a customized blog of blogs.

The site is designed for people who may have heard about Web logs but are not sure how to start reading them, said Nick Denton, Kinja's president, whose small blog-publishing empire includes the New York gossip site Gawker (gawker.com).

''Everyone has this illusion that Web logs have taken the world by storm,'' Mr. Denton said, ''but Web logs have probably only reached 10 percent of the Internet population. Our goal is to reach the remainder.''

In addition to Kinja, there are other, more technically complex sites and programs designed to make it easier to stay on top of many different blogs and news sites without having to visit each one to check for updates. These include Web-based services like Bloglines and stand-alone software like NewzCrawler for PC's and NetNewsWire for Macs.

Many blog publishers, and some traditional news sites, have embraced the digesting trend by offering feeds of their content in standardized formats. A site called Feedster (www.feedster.com) monitors half a million such feeds and makes them searchable, adding new blog entries to its results less than an hour after they are published. (Kinja says its system can digest blogs that do not have feeds.)

Then there are sites like Blogdex (blogdex.net) and Technorati (www.technorati.com), which track the links in Web logs and compile up-to-the-minute lists of the most widely referenced links and most-discussed news articles. These sites also turn blogging into a popularity contest by allowing bloggers to see how many other sites link to theirs and how that number stacks up against those of other blogs.

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The list of popular links at Blogdex, which includes references to mainstream news outlets and tiny personal sites, is a vivid example of how bloggers compile their own news reports from across the Web, selecting fragments that interest them no matter what the source. Now services like Kinja allow blogs themselves to be sliced and diced into a customized package.

Meg Hourihan, Kinja's project director and a founder of the blog publishing service Blogger, said she was ambivalent about the trend toward smaller and smaller scraps of information: ''If you read 500 snippets, you can seem really up to speed at a cocktail party, but are you really prepared to make good decisions about the world?'' At least with Kinja, she said, gathering those snippets is a more efficient process.

Jay Rosen, the chairman of the journalism department at New York University and a blogger himself (pressthink.org), said services that allow readers to have more control over their information diet can actually give them a greater understanding of topics they choose to follow in depth -- sports teams, for example. ''Sure, they're covered extensively, but compared to what some people want to know, it's a trifle,'' he said.

The fragmentation of news online is part of a larger trend of moving editorial power into the hands of the audience, Mr. Rosen said. ''The old system was, 'Here's our news; take it or leave it,''' he said. ''Now, sovereignty over the story is shifting.''

Mr. Denton said Kinja users would be able to decide whether to make their customized digests public and that the best digests would be promoted at the site, making the users ''part of the editorial team.'' Kinja and its competitors could end up creating another opportunity in the blog marketplace: who will blog about the best blogs of blogs?